One of my favorite weblogs, INTEL DUMP, has moved from BlogSpot to a site called PowerBlogs that I hadn’t heard of until Phil Carter mentioned moving his site there. PowerBlogs is basically the same thing as TypePad, except that the prices are a bit higher and the bandwidth and disk space limits are much higher. They also have their own weblog software that appears to be written in Perl. I have no idea how many customers they have or how much room there is in the weblog hosting business, but it appears to be growing.
What this really proves to me is that an ongoing failure of vision continues to plague me. When I first started blogging in December of 1998, I hand edited my HTML. There was no such thing as Blogger or GreyMatter, to say nothing of Movable Type or other more recent entrants in the market for weblog software. I quickly realized that I was going to need software to manage this stuff, so I wrote some (I still use that old crappy software). Had I, at that point, thought that this weblog thing was going to be a big deal, I could have packaged it all up and earned fame as the author of the first open source weblog software, or eventually started up some kind of a hosting gig like the ones we’re seeing today. I opted to do nothing and toil in obscurity. Such is life.
Interestingly, even before I had a weblog, I realized that PHP was going to be a big deal. I suggested to my publisher that they pay me to write a PHP book. They declined. I went to O’Reilly. They said they already had a PHP book in the works (it was never published). I contacted an agent and they pitched PHP books to everybody. No takers. I just did an Amazon.com search: 2,037 matches in books for PHP. So sometimes even when you have the vision, things don’t work out.
PowerBlogs
One of my favorite weblogs, INTEL DUMP, has moved from BlogSpot to a site called PowerBlogs that I hadn’t heard of until Phil Carter mentioned moving his site there. PowerBlogs is basically the same thing as TypePad, except that the prices are a bit higher and the bandwidth and disk space limits are much higher. They also have their own weblog software that appears to be written in Perl. I have no idea how many customers they have or how much room there is in the weblog hosting business, but it appears to be growing.
What this really proves to me is that an ongoing failure of vision continues to plague me. When I first started blogging in December of 1998, I hand edited my HTML. There was no such thing as Blogger or GreyMatter, to say nothing of Movable Type or other more recent entrants in the market for weblog software. I quickly realized that I was going to need software to manage this stuff, so I wrote some (I still use that old crappy software). Had I, at that point, thought that this weblog thing was going to be a big deal, I could have packaged it all up and earned fame as the author of the first open source weblog software, or eventually started up some kind of a hosting gig like the ones we’re seeing today. I opted to do nothing and toil in obscurity. Such is life.
Interestingly, even before I had a weblog, I realized that PHP was going to be a big deal. I suggested to my publisher that they pay me to write a PHP book. They declined. I went to O’Reilly. They said they already had a PHP book in the works (it was never published). I contacted an agent and they pitched PHP books to everybody. No takers. I just did an Amazon.com search: 2,037 matches in books for PHP. So sometimes even when you have the vision, things don’t work out.
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